Son of man,

Eliot, in his own notes, referred to Ezekiel 2:1: “He said to me, Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.‘” Christ also uses the moniker to refer to Himself, e.g., in Matthew 9:6: “But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins…”

The basic meaning of “son of man” in Hebrew is “human being” (ben-adam, or son-of-Adam, who was the Biblical first man). This can be one sense it has in Ezekiel: God addresses Ezekiel as a representative and spokesperson for the human race. However, this phrase is not common in the Bible; in the Old Testament it can be found predominantly in Ezekiel, while in the New Testament it is almost exclusively used by Jesus.

The origin of the phrase “son of man” in reference to the Messiah comes from Daniel 7:13-14:

I saw in the night visions,
And behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.

Here, “Son” is a proper noun and implicitly refers not to the second person of Christianity’s triune-God, but rather to the reader, the audience, or whomever shall hear the warnings of Ezekiel. It prepares the reader for Eliot’s allusion to Ezekiel’s prophecies in lines 21-2 and remains relevant through the end of the section. It connects modernity’s decrepitude not with Christ’s ministry and teleological triumph by the end of the Gospels, but rather with Ezekiel, Isaiah, and their call to the sons of men: repentance or annihilation…